As Seen in Vanity Fair's August 2006 Issue!
As Seen in US News & World Report's September 11 Fifth Anniversary Issue!
As Seen in Time Magazine's September 11, 2006 Issue!
As Seen in Phoenix New Times' August 9, 2007 Issue!

Friday, April 02, 2010

ANSWERing the Question

Who are you referring to? Have you tried working with the ANSWER crowd?

We were civil and did everything they asked and they shut us out, again.

We endorsed the March 20th event, donated as much or more than most of the other organizations and they denied us two minutes to speak on stage.

Next time you see Brian Becker ask him why his brother Richard treats us so poorly in SF. Ask him why the ANSWER organizers threatened to call the police on WAC LA during their march.

The Northern California 9/11 Truth Alliance booth was the most popular at the rally, but they won't let anyone mention 9/11 on their stage.

Tell me what you think is going on here, Jon?

This is a very good question, and the answer (ANSWER) is that the "peace" movement has collapsed so completely during the Obama Administration that they can't see that the "Truth" movement is now on a par with them. I remember back in 2006, the Troofers used to point to an oceanful of signs and say "Look, there's a 9-11 Truth poster." Now they actually dominate the scenery as we saw with the LA crowd.

But the peace movement is still operating under the old regime, where they had hundreds of thousands showing up to protest Bush. Nowadays they're drawing fractions of the Tea Party movement (which I neither endorse nor condemn). They are having a hard time adjusting to the fact that the Troofers are a very significant minority in the anti-Obama peace movement; probably larger than the Workers World Party cadres (from whom ANSWER was formed), and just as motivated.

I actually give Cindy Sheehan and Dahlia Wasfi some credit here; they seem to have adjusted to the realities on the ground. The 9-11 Troof movement is now a significant part of the peace movement. As to which side that benefits, deponent sayeth not.

26 Comments:

Basically, the Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh, wanted to nationalize his country's oil (they had, and still have, a lot). At the time, a British business concern, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, controlled Iran's oil, and the idea of losing that control to the natives, as it were, didn't really appeal to them. In fact, it pissed them off. So much so that the Brits asked the Americans if they'd like to help get rid of Mossadegh (at least, get him out of power), and eventually, the CIA was on board. And so, in 1953, they staged a coup that was made to look like a popular uprising, and it was sayonara Mohammed Mossadegh, hello Mohammed Reza Pahlavi (better known to us work-a-day Americans as the Shah).

Now, if you read the Times's report on this (the link above), they say this: “The outlines of the American role in the coup were disclosed in Iran at the outset and later in the memoirs of C.I.A. officers and other published accounts.” Now, that makes it sound (at least to me), that everybody in Iran knew that the CIA had orchestrated it shortly after the event. Which sounds odd to me. Why would they reveal this at all, let alone so soon, to the very country whose democratic government they so criminally interfered with? In any case, I did some digging, and found this, published in the Times in 1961 and written by one Harry Howe Ransom, (then a professor at Harvard, and described two years later in another Times article as “the leading academic student of C.I.A. [sic, i.e., not “the C.I.A”][1]): “For example, the C.I.A. played a dominant role in the overthrow of Premier Mossadegh in Iran in August, 1953, after his abortive attempt, in league with the Communist Tudeh party, to exit the pro-Western Shah. This role has never been officially admitted.”

I'm not trying to be a wise guy here; or if I am, it's not to make you feel bad, but to point out that, just because many years go by, and an secret operation is both complicated and involves many players, it doesn't mean that there has to be a whistleblower somewhere who'll blow the lid on the whole thing. Some times bad shit just happens.The other point I want to raise is: let's say you're a well-educated American, and it's 1954, less than a year after the coup; and a friend of yours suggests that the coup might have been instigated, at least in part, but the CIA. What would you think? It's 1954, not even 10 years since America basically saved the world, destroying dictatorships and empires that sneered at ideas like “democracy” and “freedom”. We were the standard bearer of all the best things one could imagine, and we wanted the whole world to be free and live in a democracy, just like us, or so, I think it's safe to assume, most Americans thought. Can you imagine even conceiving that the US would do such a dastardly thing as overthrow a democratically elected government and replace it with a dictator? No, that would have been ludicrous. And that friend of yours would obviously have to be a paranoid conspiracy freak (even though I don't think the term had been coined then).

Anonymous, these misguided historical digressions are convincing nobody. One of President Bush's speechwriters, using the great man himself as a conduit, put it best, - Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories.

Those memorable words cut through your all your bullshit CIA 1953 parallels. In years to come, if you're lucky, you'll look back & laugh that you ever believed any of this David Icke style waffle, not unlike the way others laugh at you now.

What's funny is that the cwazy twoooofers™ run up against a group of hard core commies who care about nothing except promoting the World Revolution™ and could give two flying fucks about anything else besides their quest to wield the whip over idiots like, well, twoooofers™ and they are astonsished at the result.

That's the problem with useful idiots, they're the ones squealing the loudest as the are led down the basement steps to be shot in the nape of the neck.

I actually give Cindy Sheehan and Dahlia Wasfi some credit here; they seem to have adjusted to the realities on the ground.

Yes and no. Yes, they're adjusting to groups like the Twoofers becoming a larger percentage of the anti-war movement... but that's only happening because everyone else is leaving the anti-war movement for more current causes. They're missing the larger point, which is that their cause has become passe.